Justin.tv Placates Copyright Holders With Anti-piracy Tech

Justin.tv began rolling out beefed up anti-piracy protections this week, as the live-streaming site looks to play nice with copyright owners and build a business that isn’t a lawsuit magnet.

The company told us via email today that it has enlisted help from Vobile to filter out copyrighted works its site, which at this point involves scanning all saved clips on Justin.tv and comparing them against Vobile’s content database. In November, the program will expand to include live content as well.

Live content, especially pirated live sports content, has gotten the service into hot water before. A Justin.tv rep said that monitoring for sports is a tougher problem, but the capabilities of services like Vobile’s are improving and getting faster.

Anti-piracy protections have been a challenge for the real-time web and an iterative process for Justin.tv. The company had previously instituted a takedown mechanism for copyright holders, so they could immediately yank infringing content. But this still required work on the part of copyright owners. They had to go to the site, find the content and have it pulled. By partnering with Vobile, Justin.tv is taking a more pre-emptive approach.

By being more pro-active, Justin.tv was able to sign a deal with FOX that says, in effect, that “since Justin.tv is being so good about policing its site, we aren’t going to bust its chops over copyright.” Justin.tv expects other copyright holders to sign on for similar deals in the coming months.

And of course a bonus to getting rid of that pirated content is that the doors are now open to do biz dev deals with the likes of FOX and others who are skittish when it comes to the types of content that show up on live-streaming sites.

But all these crackdowns on copyrighted content are bound to adversely impact Justin.tv’s traffic, right? A Justin.tv rep agreed, but said that the type of traffic that infringing content attracts isn’t high-value traffic — in other words, not the kind of traffic with which you you want to build a business.